Speaking as another bioinformaticist who comes from a mostly CS and math background: math is hard, CS is hard, and biology is hard. There is a good reason why people earn separate PhD's in each of these fields. All are rigorous intellectual disciplines demanding years of study to master, and none is any easier than the others. Anyone in any of them who thinks that any of the others is easy to pick up on the fly is in for a nasty shock at some point.
You know, I served with a lot of great people during my time in uniform. Really smart, brave, dedicated, thoughtful, hardworking people who were a credit to the service, the nation, and the Constitution they swore to defend.
I also served with a lot of shitheads like you.
Kill yourself now. It's the best thing you can do for your country.
You cells will explode due to osmosis if you drink pure H2O.
No they won't. I don't know where this absurd myth came from, but it's easy enough to perform the experiment yourself: buy a jug of distilled water at the grocery store, drink it, and the worst that will happen to you is you'll be running back and forth to the toilet for a while.
Interesting, thanks. Unfortunately, without a comparison to rates of resistance in countries where antibiotics do require a prescription to dispense, it doesn't really establish the claim.
Do you have a source for this? I'm not saying you're wrong, just wondering about the basis for the claim. It strikes me as possibly being one of those "common sense" ideas that turns out not to be true when you actually crunch the numbers.
While Ayn Rand oversimplified everyone to being either black or white, don't accuse the her of glorifying corporations - for every "good" CEO in the Atlas Shrugged there are 100 "bad" CEOs.
Which is great, in a work of fantasy. Unfortunately, in the real world, that 1 good CEO doesn't exist. So the Randroids, because there are no real-life Hank Reardens or Francisco d'Anconias to idolize, have to pretend that those 100's are actually a bunch of 1's.
The 100's aren't the kind of mustache-twirling villains Rand portrayed either, of course. Mostly they're just people getting through their days, doing what they see as right. But the world they live in warps normal human values so completely that what seems right to them is indistinguishable from deliberate villainy in its effects.
Of course, Ayn Rand makes heroes of CEOs of giant corporations -- the same people who, in real life, buy these laws and regulations. There's a lesson here, but I doubt you or any other of the legion of Randroids will get it.
What does gay marriage or the lack thereof actually do? Nothing at all.
Unless you're gay and want to marry your partner, in which case it does quite a lot.
Never assume that the freedoms you care most about are the ones that are most important to other people. You want to live your life as you see fit; so does everyone else, and what you see fit to do may well be something that's of no interest to them.
Support other people's freedoms. It gives them a motivation to support yours.
And it does, indeed, mean in this context that you cannot draw any conclusions about causation from correlation alone!
If you dispute that, then refute that. Explain what it really means in this context, if you believe the meaning is something else. Let's see what you think it means. Otherwise, you are just blowing hot air.
As opposed to moving the goalposts, which seems to be one of your favorite rhetorical tricks?
The first sentence I quoted above is in fact true. But that's not what you said originally. You said "No conclusions, or even implications, can be drawn at all from simple correlation," which is a much stronger statement.
Mathematically, implication is an absolute: "A implies B" means that if A is true, then B must always be true. But in everyday usage, "imply" is not absolute at all. Indeed, the use of the word almost always indicates some uncertainty: "Alice implied that Bob killed Charlie" is a very different statement from "Alice said that Bob killed Charlie," and you wouldn't say the first if you meant the second. If you distinguish between conclusions and implications, as you did in your original post, then you have to be using the common, less-than-certain meaning of "imply," because mathematically the statement is meaningless -- if you can draw implications, in a mathematical sense, the conclusions follow automatically. So you are claiming that correlation does not, in the common sense of the word, imply anything, and that is simply not true.
I suspect you know all this perfectly well, and are just mixing up the meanings to muddy the waters. Feel free to do that all you want, but don't be surprised when people call you on your bullshit.
Note that the saying is not "correlation does not prove causation", the saying is "correlation does not imply causation". That is no accident. No conclusions, or even implications, can be drawn at all from simple correlation.
You fail both statistics and English forever.
Hint: the word "imply" has different meanings in mathematics and in everyday usage, and if you don't understand this difference and what it means for what you just wrote, you're too ignorant to have anything meaningful to say on the subject. Cf. creationists and "it's just a theory!"
Only an idiot would claim that men are discriminated against in maternity wards because it ignores the fact that men can't get pregnant. Likewise, claiming that one of every two Americans are women and therefore one of every two software developers must be a woman or else sexism is also absurd.
You're missing the point. Saying "likewise" is absurd when the two situations are nothing alike. Are you really so fixated on your own analogy that you can't see the obvious difference?
I don't know whether to be impressed by their gall or appalled at their ignorance. More likely the latter; to the marketing types who come up with this kind of gimmick, anything that happened more than five minutes ago is one with Ninevah and Tyre.
(And yes, I know it was 11:00 in 1918. Somehow that makes this worse, not better.)
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 1
This is the way it *SHOULD* be you dumbass statist. Only the PRIVATE sector can do things reliably, consistently, and with absolute dedication to quality and affordability through innovation and the invisible hand of the free market. The government (as we all know from all the stories on slashdot) is incompetent in everything it does, why woul dyou want national security handled by people whos only interest is the size of their fat cat union backed paycheck?
Poe's Law in action: I honestly can't tell if this post is serious or satire. In the latter case, AC, congratulations on getting it so pitch-perfect.
Well, you could make the case that philosophers who take the "philosophical zombie" idea seriously enough to base arguments on it have clearly either been turned into the voodoo kind of zombie by a particularly malicious houngan, or had their brains eaten by the Hollywood kind of zombie, but otherwise, yeah.
Single-celled organisms are generally a lot more flexible when it comes to environmental stress than multi-cellular organisms are, and among the latter, plants are generally more flexible than animals. Observing this kind of adaptation in animals is pretty impressive. Nobody expects life to stop adapting to the environment, but there are limits; e.g., humans aren't going to evolve resistance to being shot in the head, no matter how many times it happens.
While I agree with you about Ron Paul, I have to say that identifying Slashdot as a "right-wing site" is ridiculous. If there's any identifiable political bent here, it's libertarian, which is neither left nor right (despite the depressingly successful attempts of the right wing, at least in the US, to co-opt libertarian sentiment) but even that's by no means consistent. Name just about any political position you can think of, and you'll find a good number of people here who hold to it, and who will be vocal in its defense.
Using a simple sign test on the differences between the means
Sign tests are for differences between medians, not differences between means. So while the median for Perl was significantly better than for Randomo, the mean was not. Which of these results you accept depends on whether you consider the mean or median more useful for this kind of test... and which result you prefer to see, of course.
(And yes, I know what you meant by the phrasing you used, but it's pretty obfuscatory. Are you a Perl programmer, by any chance?)
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as another bioinformaticist who comes from a mostly CS and math background: math is hard, CS is hard, and biology is hard. There is a good reason why people earn separate PhD's in each of these fields. All are rigorous intellectual disciplines demanding years of study to master, and none is any easier than the others. Anyone in any of them who thinks that any of the others is easy to pick up on the fly is in for a nasty shock at some point.
just trying to figure out who the metaphorical Vampire is in this one
Yeah, my first thought before I even saw the graphic was, "Why would a vampire want to name a phone after someone who's going to kill it?"
You know, I served with a lot of great people during my time in uniform. Really smart, brave, dedicated, thoughtful, hardworking people who were a credit to the service, the nation, and the Constitution they swore to defend.
I also served with a lot of shitheads like you.
Kill yourself now. It's the best thing you can do for your country.
You cells will explode due to osmosis if you drink pure H2O.
No they won't. I don't know where this absurd myth came from, but it's easy enough to perform the experiment yourself: buy a jug of distilled water at the grocery store, drink it, and the worst that will happen to you is you'll be running back and forth to the toilet for a while.
Interesting, thanks. Unfortunately, without a comparison to rates of resistance in countries where antibiotics do require a prescription to dispense, it doesn't really establish the claim.
The Bible does not list an age for the Universe, nor even for planet Earth.
Tell that to these guys.
Do you have a source for this? I'm not saying you're wrong, just wondering about the basis for the claim. It strikes me as possibly being one of those "common sense" ideas that turns out not to be true when you actually crunch the numbers.
While Ayn Rand oversimplified everyone to being either black or white, don't accuse the her of glorifying corporations - for every "good" CEO in the Atlas Shrugged there are 100 "bad" CEOs.
Which is great, in a work of fantasy. Unfortunately, in the real world, that 1 good CEO doesn't exist. So the Randroids, because there are no real-life Hank Reardens or Francisco d'Anconias to idolize, have to pretend that those 100's are actually a bunch of 1's.
The 100's aren't the kind of mustache-twirling villains Rand portrayed either, of course. Mostly they're just people getting through their days, doing what they see as right. But the world they live in warps normal human values so completely that what seems right to them is indistinguishable from deliberate villainy in its effects.
If you'd actually read Atlas Shrugged you would know that the corporate heads who buy these laws and regulations are portrayed as villains.
I've read it. And yes, I remember her cartoon-villain evil CEOs, and her cartoon-hero good CEOs. And I know which type exists in the real world.
Of course, Ayn Rand makes heroes of CEOs of giant corporations -- the same people who, in real life, buy these laws and regulations. There's a lesson here, but I doubt you or any other of the legion of Randroids will get it.
What does gay marriage or the lack thereof actually do? Nothing at all.
Unless you're gay and want to marry your partner, in which case it does quite a lot.
Never assume that the freedoms you care most about are the ones that are most important to other people. You want to live your life as you see fit; so does everyone else, and what you see fit to do may well be something that's of no interest to them.
Support other people's freedoms. It gives them a motivation to support yours.
And it does, indeed, mean in this context that you cannot draw any conclusions about causation from correlation alone!
If you dispute that, then refute that. Explain what it really means in this context, if you believe the meaning is something else. Let's see what you think it means. Otherwise, you are just blowing hot air.
As opposed to moving the goalposts, which seems to be one of your favorite rhetorical tricks?
The first sentence I quoted above is in fact true. But that's not what you said originally. You said "No conclusions, or even implications, can be drawn at all from simple correlation," which is a much stronger statement.
Mathematically, implication is an absolute: "A implies B" means that if A is true, then B must always be true. But in everyday usage, "imply" is not absolute at all. Indeed, the use of the word almost always indicates some uncertainty: "Alice implied that Bob killed Charlie" is a very different statement from "Alice said that Bob killed Charlie," and you wouldn't say the first if you meant the second. If you distinguish between conclusions and implications, as you did in your original post, then you have to be using the common, less-than-certain meaning of "imply," because mathematically the statement is meaningless -- if you can draw implications, in a mathematical sense, the conclusions follow automatically. So you are claiming that correlation does not, in the common sense of the word, imply anything, and that is simply not true.
I suspect you know all this perfectly well, and are just mixing up the meanings to muddy the waters. Feel free to do that all you want, but don't be surprised when people call you on your bullshit.
Note that the saying is not "correlation does not prove causation", the saying is "correlation does not imply causation". That is no accident. No conclusions, or even implications, can be drawn at all from simple correlation.
You fail both statistics and English forever.
Hint: the word "imply" has different meanings in mathematics and in everyday usage, and if you don't understand this difference and what it means for what you just wrote, you're too ignorant to have anything meaningful to say on the subject. Cf. creationists and "it's just a theory!"
Only an idiot would claim that men are discriminated against in maternity wards because it ignores the fact that men can't get pregnant. Likewise, claiming that one of every two Americans are women and therefore one of every two software developers must be a woman or else sexism is also absurd.
You're missing the point. Saying "likewise" is absurd when the two situations are nothing alike. Are you really so fixated on your own analogy that you can't see the obvious difference?
Yes, that's it exactly. Thank you.
I don't know whether to be impressed by their gall or appalled at their ignorance. More likely the latter; to the marketing types who come up with this kind of gimmick, anything that happened more than five minutes ago is one with Ninevah and Tyre.
(And yes, I know it was 11:00 in 1918. Somehow that makes this worse, not better.)
This is the way it *SHOULD* be you dumbass statist. Only the PRIVATE sector can do things reliably, consistently, and with absolute dedication to quality and affordability through innovation and the invisible hand of the free market. The government (as we all know from all the stories on slashdot) is incompetent in everything it does, why woul dyou want national security handled by people whos only interest is the size of their fat cat union backed paycheck?
Poe's Law in action: I honestly can't tell if this post is serious or satire. In the latter case, AC, congratulations on getting it so pitch-perfect.
Any relationship between them is accidental.
Well, you could make the case that philosophers who take the "philosophical zombie" idea seriously enough to base arguments on it have clearly either been turned into the voodoo kind of zombie by a particularly malicious houngan, or had their brains eaten by the Hollywood kind of zombie, but otherwise, yeah.
Single-celled organisms are generally a lot more flexible when it comes to environmental stress than multi-cellular organisms are, and among the latter, plants are generally more flexible than animals. Observing this kind of adaptation in animals is pretty impressive. Nobody expects life to stop adapting to the environment, but there are limits; e.g., humans aren't going to evolve resistance to being shot in the head, no matter how many times it happens.
That which kills other fish only makes them stronger!
slashdot and other right-wing sites on the web
While I agree with you about Ron Paul, I have to say that identifying Slashdot as a "right-wing site" is ridiculous. If there's any identifiable political bent here, it's libertarian, which is neither left nor right (despite the depressingly successful attempts of the right wing, at least in the US, to co-opt libertarian sentiment) but even that's by no means consistent. Name just about any political position you can think of, and you'll find a good number of people here who hold to it, and who will be vocal in its defense.
Caribbean voodoo, actually.
The modern conception of zombies has practically nothing in common with the voodoo version.
[snort]
This is an example of a price being raised a small amount that won't affect the overall demand for the product
I'm not sure about that. People like nice round numbers. $1.20 is kind of a weird price point.
Using a simple sign test on the differences between the means
Sign tests are for differences between medians, not differences between means. So while the median for Perl was significantly better than for Randomo, the mean was not. Which of these results you accept depends on whether you consider the mean or median more useful for this kind of test ... and which result you prefer to see, of course.
(And yes, I know what you meant by the phrasing you used, but it's pretty obfuscatory. Are you a Perl programmer, by any chance?)